Pros

Excellent language-learning content.
Lessons are an appropriate length for mobile learning.
Good options for turning off speech modules for studying in public places.
Can study multiple languages, with no restrictions.
100 percent free.

Cons

Small number of languages included.

Bottom Line

Android users now have access to the best free language-learning app on the market, with Duolingo finally available on that platform.
Duolingo lets you study or brush up on Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese, with a learning experience that's well suited for a mobile device.

12 Nov 2015Jill Duffy

Duolingo remains the best free language-learning program. The content is so strong that Duolingo ranks among the best software for learning a language, even when measured against paid programs. It's a clear Editors' Choice at PCMag, considering all the value you get for free. The Android app is one of several platforms on which you can experience Duolingo, and it holds up just as well as the Duolingo iPhone app and website. It's extremely well designed for on-the-go learning, thanks to short lessons and a simple user interface.

For a deep dive on all Duolingo's features, be sure to read my review of Duolingo.com.

Thirteen languages are included in the Duolingo Android app (assuming your language of instruction is English), though some of them are in beta or "hatching" phase, and it's hard to tell from the app which of them are fully completed courses. If you need to learn a language that Duolingo doesn't support, I recommend looking to Rosetta Stone first, which is PCMag's Editors' Choice among paid language-learning software. You'll find a few other recommendations for apps to learn less-common languages in the following section.

Languages Offered

Duolingo offers a wide array of language-learning courses for people with different native languages, and they're all at different stages of development. Remember: Duolingo is largely crowd-sourced. If you're a fluent speaker of, say, French, you might find other languages available to study that aren't available yet for English speakers. I'll summarize the language options for English speakers here, noting their states of completion.

What's tricky is there's no indication in the app about the stage of completion of these programs. The website will tell you that, as of this writing, only 11 programs are fully supported: Danish, Dutch, French, German, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. These programs are considered stable. Esperanto and Ukrainian are technically still in beta.

More language-learning courses are in development and available on Duolingo.com but are not yet in the Android app. They are: Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, and Vietnamese. There's also a Klingon course in development. I exclude languages from fictional works in my total count of languages.

If you need to learn a hard-to-find language, try Pimsleur Comprehensive, Transparent Language, or (as a last resort) Mango Passport. Pimsleur has 49 languages and is excellent, but it's almost all audio-based. Transparent has 60 language programs, excluding English and not counting transliterated versions separately. Mango is my least favorite of these three, but it has programs for 63 languages.

Price

As mentioned, Duolingo is completely free to use. The company's business model relies on cutting deals with websites and other companies that need materials translated. Learners can opt in to translating some of these materials in order to practice what they've learned, though it's not required. The translation section is more like bonus material. In any event, Duolingo's founders are also university researchers who found that translations done by large groups were often as good as translations done by bilingual speakers. It's a win-win situation.

To give you a sense of how much paid language-learning programs typically cost, a 12-month online Rosetta Stone membership has a list price of $299, though it regularly sells at a discount for $199. Living Language offers a Platinum subscription for $179, which gives you one year of access to the online course for the language of your choice, and includes some e-tutoring sessions and access to iOS apps.

The audio program Pimsleur costs $119 for lessons 1 through 30 as MP3 downloads, so you can use the program on your phone. While it's the least-interactive of the language-learning programs I've tested, the pedagogy itself is very high quality and excellent for mobile devices. If you ever dreamed of learning a language while you drive to and from work each day, Pimsleur is the package to get.

Duolingo's Structure

To get access to Duolingo, you can sign up with an email address and password, or you can authenticate via Facebook or Google. Then you pick which languages you want to learn from the list. You can sign up for as many languages as you want. I've used Duolingo since it first launched, in French, German, Spanish, and Irish.

The Android app is fun to use, with short exercises that are ideal for learning when you have a little time. If you use the website and other Duolingo apps, your progress is automatically synced between your devices.

A typical Duolingo Lesson takes about five minutes. The short time commitment is part of what makes the Android app so useful. It's easy to lose yourself and complete 45 minutes of instructions, but it's just as easy to drop in during a break, practice a few words and phrases, and quickly get back to what you were doing.

Exercises cover reading, writing, listening, and speaking, although you can optionally turn off the speaking exercises if you're in a place where talking aloud might be embarrassing or rude. After one hour, the microphone automatically becomes enabled again, a tiny design decision that I love. In many other language-learning apps, once you shut off the microphone, you have to jump through a bunch of complex settings to re-enable it.

In Duolingo's mobile app, "speaking" just means talking into a voice-recognition system that marks you right or wrong. There is no live interaction with other students or teachers in Duolingo. You won't see waveforms of your voice either. I personally find waveforms decidedly unhelpful, though, so I don't consider their omission a flaw.

A home screen for each language shows you a roadmap of what you'll learn. That kind of outline may sound minor, but when it's missing from a language-learning program, it really hurts your ability to learn well and study consistently.

Practicing in Duolingo Duolingo prompts you to enter a goal, such as studying every day and earning, say, 30 points. Ten points is equivalent to completing one lesson. Duolingo watches how often you hit or exceed your goals and rewards you with happy messages on screen and Lingots, which are in-app credits you can use to unlock additional content.

If you start as an experienced language-learner, you can test out of various sections. But if you fail the test, you can't jump ahead. Rather, you have to work through lessons and units lessons to progress. You can jump around a little bit within a unit, but you can't skip ahead from, say, learning basic vocabulary to working on verb tenses.

I like this rule about not being able to jump ahead. It gives me clear guidance as to what to study next. If you prefer more freedom, especially if you're more experienced in the language you're studying, I recommend Transparent Language Online. It has a really hard placement test that puts you at the right point in the program, and it lets you skip ahead to any lesson you want.

Another great resource for more experienced learners is Yabla, which offers language-learning through online videos. You watch videos about things that interest you, such as travel or technology, and you see translations at the bottom of the screen. An interactive quiz at the end of the video lets you test your knowledge. Yabla is not great for beginners, but it is an interesting way to practice a language for more experienced learners.

Duolingo's core teaching is extremely clear. The exercises are solid and replicate some of the typical drills available in better-known language software such as Rosetta Stone.

Exercises build on one another so that you're introduced to words and concepts at the right point in the program. Typical lessons have multiple-choice questions, listen-and-write exercises, translation exercises, and spoken exercises, too. This structure makes Duolingo really suitable for beginners.

There are a few notable aspects of Duolingo that make its exercises truly great. One is that minor typos are tolerated. On a mobile platform, that's huge. If you accidentally misspell a word due to fat fingers or an autocorrect coup, the exercise is marked as correct, usually, and Duolingo points out the mistake. You're not penalized for stuff that typically goes wrong on a mobile device.

If you get a question wrong and don't understand why you're wrong, you can often find comments from other users who have discussed the issue. You also have an opportunity to ask a question related to the exercise. People helpfully chime in to explain issues of grammar and usage. You can interact more with the community on the Duolingo.com website.

An Essential Addition

Whether you use it on its own or to supplement classroom learning, Duolingo is an essential addition to every language-learning program. The Android app makes it easy to keep up with daily studies. This free program has tremendous features that work surprisingly well at getting you to practice a language. Among free language-learning tools, Duolingo is PCMag's Editors' Choice. Even if you're already using another language-learning software program or taking a language class, you can always pair it with this free online program to strengthen your skills.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, ... See Full Bio